After months of argument and refusal, Hamas has announced that it will hand its weapons to the National Committee for the Administration of the Gaza Strip. The step is more than the signing of an agreement: it lays bare the crisis of the ideological and doctrinal model that Hamas and its sister organizations adopted- a model that has now brought the movement to surrender the very weapons it treated for decades as its symbol and its sole instrument of struggle and resistance.
The trouble with Hamas's performance is how completely it ignored the structural flaws in its own ideology, and how little it weighed the way the world- a broad segment of the Arab world included- had come to see it. Hamas waved away the Palestinian split, its armed seizure of Gaza, and its designation across much of the world as a terrorist organization, trusting that the ideological commitment of its members and the sacrifices many of them made would outweigh all of it.
We should also remember that those who sympathized with the Palestinian cause and marched in the streets of cities East and West never once said they were backing Hamas or its political project. They went no further than solidarity with a just cause and rejection of Israel's massacres of Palestinian civilians.
The moment Hamas hands its weapons and its "authority" in Gaza to a technocratic committee working under a foreign body- the Gaza Executive Board- ought to stand as its own admission that its political and military project, and the calculations behind it, have failed.
True, the occupation gutted the two-state solution in the West Bank through settlement expansion, besieged Gaza, and then committed acts of genocide with impunity. But none of that makes armed force the instrument that must be used to confront it. And when that option is taken- above all in an operation on the scale of October 7- its consequences have to be weighed with precision, whatever the justifications and whatever the scale of Israel's crimes.
Had Hamas belonged to the tradition of the world's national liberation movements, instead of coming out of the Muslim Brotherhood's international organization, it might have confined its October operation to military targets. It might, too, have built alliances with the forces and movements sympathetic to the Palestinian cause- might even have become part of the global popular movement that rose in Palestine's support.
Surrendering its weapons is a reckoning for Hamas, but not the liquidation of the Palestinian cause or its decisive defeat, because the cause will not vanish. It is, rather, a "defeat on points" for the ideological and political model the movement followed for decades.
When Hamas leaders say the movement "will continue to exercise its civil and political role," they are speaking at least two years too late. The difficulty is that Hamas's members grew used to a framework in which civil and political struggle counted only as an extension of the military project. That relationship now has to be turned the other way around.
What separates national liberation movements from armed militias is that the former never treat carrying weapons as an end in itself: armed struggle serves the civil and political project, in pursuit of independence and liberation.
Hamas's lasting problem is that its idea of a civil and political presence came down largely to delivering social and community services- and while that gave it a real foothold in Palestinian society, the movement has lacked figures able to address the international community, much of which had mobilized for the Palestinian cause.
Here Hamas differs from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which in earlier decades fielded political leaders capable of speaking to the world and swaying it- before the organization sank into stagnation and underperformance in recent years under the Palestinian Authority.
If Trump's plan is carried out, Hamas gives up its weapons, and Israel withdraws from Gaza, the Palestinian cause will need a new generation of young leaders able to move past the Hamas–Palestinian Authority divide and build a project that can engage the civil and political realities now taking shape worldwide.
Hamas's announcement that it would surrender its weapons may prove to have been the first declaration of that new beginning.
